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Reading The Pictures is dedicated to the analysis of news photos and media images.

December 23, 2013

The BagNews Best 13 Posts of 2013

2013, by all measures, was a year of milestones here at BagNews. We redesigned our site and upgraded our hosting. We set records for viewership. We expanded our fine list of contributors. We relaunched our original photojournalism section. And most significantly, we expanded our focus to address the art and practice of photojournalism, complimenting our longstanding emphasis on the analysis and critique of news photos.

We hope you’ll enjoy this compendium. It wasn’t easy culling 2013 down to these thirteen posts. If we missed some of your favorites, it might be because another goal of this collection was to represent the range of perspectives we take.

Another highlight of 2013 was our dependability, posting and tweeting the visual news up to six days a week the year round. Given that diligence, we know you’ll forgive us this Christmas week off as we pick up again next Monday, the 30th. In the meantime, because there’s a lot here, we hope you’ll commit some time to absorb this work and perhaps return more than once to share your thoughts.

Until then, we wish all of you, our readers and commenters, our contributors and guides, our family and friends, the warmest holiday season.

This exposé, which reverberated for weeks, detailed inaccuracies in an award winning documentary photo. In a concentrated fashion, it led to wide and constructive discussion about photojournalism ethics, the representation of blighted cities, the politics of photo contests and the comparative roles of bloggers as compared to journalists.

Perhaps the photographer deceived the Times about a main figures in his story. Perhaps the Times knew the story was compromised and published it anyway. Either way, our argument had to do with the integrity of a published story, whether in print or online, believing that journalism, conducted properly, involves the addition of corrections. Otherwise, the news media is on a slippery slope if a story can be entirely disappeared, like this one was.

Every year, it seems, there are a handful of viral photos that demonstrate two things: a frozen moment in time can play tricks on one’s eyes, and the 24/7 news cycle is a virtual incubator of the pretend.

This was one of our most widely circulated posts this year. Valerie Wieskamp, a PhD Candidate in Rhetoric and Public Culture at Indiana U., raises the question why this very famous image from the My Lai Massacre, although officially documented as such, has never been widely recognized as evidence of military sexual assault. Further, she raises the question why “The Napalm Girl” is so familiar while the public has no recognition of “The Black Blouse Girl.”